Wing Chun Ladies Club Introduction to Sparring

In the late 1980’s we set up a Ladies only Wing Chun club in Victoria’s Chinatown. One of our members by the name of Yvette Wong ran the club.

In this video we just got onto the topic of  sparring. Sparring has it’s place but the ladies were aware that this was different from real determined attackers attacking you. However very basic sparring got them to practice a bit of footwork plus they all enjoyed it. It was the first time most of them had tried this kind of fighting.

Our approach to freestyle fighting was really to learn all the forms first because every form after the first deals with Wing Chun footwork. For sparring against different arts, you need footwork. The Wing Chun wooden dummy and the weapons training are pretty good for the basic ideas.

Nevertheless as soon as the ladies finished learning the second form of Wing Chun, we did this for fun.

My approach was to have a medium uniform speed for safety and so that nobody would be scared or anxious. It was not meant to be a competition but just a learning experience.

My job was to feed various attacks from anything that I knew. In real, you don’t get attacked by other Wing Chun people.

So attacks could be wrestling type of attacks, Karate attacks, Hung style attacks, Wing Chun attacks, hay maker attacks etc. Jt was just to get the ladies used to moving around and to timing and distancing etc.

Separate training would cover all the static type of attacks such as grabs, chokes, knife slashes etc. All have to be practiced at safe speeds. Training to hit with speed and power was a separate practice again.

By this time the ladies had trained random sticking hands practice, so they didn’t have to think about what to do, once in contact.

At this time, there was no YouTube and the ladies had not met with any Wing Chun Masters. That would come later.

These days, every fighting art has improved and many ladies now are pretty good fighters in any art. In the 1960’s there were of course pretty good women fighters in Karate and TaekwonDo. The ladies in the Filipino arts and arts like Silat were also good but not much information was available to us about these arts at the time.

These days the women MMA fighters are very good. These days we are blessed with having YouTube videos about every kind of fighting art. Martial arts are never static, they all constantly evolve.

Often what does not evolve is people’s biased opinions about what art is or isn’t good based on a few random samples of fighting they have seen. They use this limited experience to draw generalized conclusions about a whole art. It’s not the art but the person behind the art that counts anyway.

Someone who has a fighting brain can make any art work.